Google Launched Flutter 1.20 Stable: New Features & Updates Declared
Popularly known as Google’s cross-platform UI toolkit, Flutter has recently launched its latest version, and it is Flutter 1.20 stable. This version was released on August 5, 2020. In the previous updates of its UI toolkit, Google has introduced substantial performance improvements, like in performance, improved support for metal on iOS application, and new material widgets.
Flutter 1.20 is built on the 2.9 release of Google’s renowned Dart programming language, and it has launched with new improvements in terms of performance, visual studio code extension, multiple UI enhancements, and auto-fill for mobile text fields, and many more.
Also Read: Top UI design trends in 2020
The newly launched Flutter 1.20 stable version is equipped with 3029 merged PRs and 5485 closed issues from 359 contributors across the world. Google has now 90,000 Flutter-based apps. The numbers were 50000 back in April.
Most of the apps come from India, and thus, the country has become the top region for hire Flutter app developers. There are plenty of opportunities that lies ahead for the Flutter app development companies.
# What’s New With Flutter 1.20 Stable?
The following are the new features as well as the developers’ tools which are released for the Flutter app development companies.
1. Autofill for Mobile Text Fields
It is one of the highly requested features among the Flutter apps developers. Now this framework supports this key functionality of auto-fill text. But still, there are some platform-specific configurations that are still not enabled (PasswordRules on iOS). Google is also bringing this functionality for web application development also.
+2. Interactive Widget
Google has also come up with widget aid, which lets a Flutter app development company design and implement interactive elements in the applications. These interactive elements include drag & drop, pan, zoom, and many more. When a Flutter app developer gets indulged in the widget building process, only then one can access the API documentation.
3. Embedded Visual Studio Code
In the recent version of Flutter 1.20 stable Google has added a new visual studio code extension to harness the Dart DevTools directly into the Visual Studio code workplace.
4. Update in DatePicker & TimePicker
In order to meet multiple latest material instructions, Google has also incorporated many other updated widgets like DatePicker, TimePicker, RangeSlider, and material slider.
Both DatePicker and TimePicker have received a new style and all-new compact designs.
5. Network Page New Version
With the latest version of Dart DevTools, users will get an updated version of the network page. The recent version will facilitate web socket profiling. Some more improvements have been done to the details UI.
6. Updating Import Statements on File Rename
The latest Flutter 1.20 stable comes with the new feature and it is about updating the imports on rename. It will automatically enable the import statements at the time of removing or renaming the files.
Also Read: Kotlin Vs Flutter: Which Should You Choose For Cross-Platform App Development?
7. Typesafe Platform Channels
There was a huge demand from plugin authors, and to meet this demand, Google is trying to make communication simpler between the flutter and the host platform. Google also wants to make it more secure for Add-to-App and plugins.
Google has built a command-line tool, namely, Pigeon. It will utilize Dart Syntax for developing a type-safe messaging code on top of the platform channels. It would reduce the extra runtime dependencies.
You can easily pass the non-primitive data objects using Pigeon, which will allow you to call Dat methods directly by imploring Kotlin/Objective-C/Swift/Java Class methods.
8. New Pubspec.yaml Format
The latest Flutter 1.20 stable has come with multiple interesting updates related to Publish Plugins. One of the most important ones is the public service declaration. If you are a plugin author of Flutter then you should know that the legacy pubspec.yaml format is no longer supported to publish plugins.
9. Responsive Licenses Page
The Flutter app developers with the recent update can now start using all-new and extremely responsive licenses pages. Users can access the licenses page from the AboutDialog section.
10. Tooling Metadata
The tooling metadata is another important update that comes with Flutter 1.20 stable. The tooling metadata for flutter framework offers the following attributes:
- A catalog of all the recent widgets of Flutter.
- A proper mapping of color names of the Flutter framework to color values for Material color sets as well as Cupertino.
- Icon metadata for material icons and Cupertino that incorporates preview icons and icon names.
Also Read: Top Front End Web Development Tools in 2020
11. The Performance Improvements
Following are mentioned the ways through which Google has enhanced the performance in Flutter 1.20 stable:
- There is a fix for tree shake icons in terms of performance. Now, it comes as default at the time of developing non-web apps.
- The tree shake icon performance enhancement you can remove any unused icons, and it will help in reducing the app’s size.
- At present, the icon font tree shaking is only restricted to TrueType Fonts, but this restriction will soon be lifted in the future.
- An application with poor animation can impact its performance badly in the first run. But now, with the help of Skia Shading Language Shader Warm-up, users can experience reduced shader compilation jank by 2 times.
- You will find the enhanced performance of mouse hit testing in the web-based micro-benchmarks by 15 times. Now because of this enhancement, Google is able to add support for mouse cursors, and it will be displayed in multiple upcoming widgets.
- In this latest update, Google has also improved the decoding time and speed of Dart’s UTF-8 decoder.
- Google has also made measurable improvements of approx 200% for English and 400% for the Chiese text on low-end ARM gadgets.
In its official statement, Google Said that with Flutter 1.20 stable, it has come up with the biggest framework-based release, but still, a lot has to come. Google has also said that it is currently working on the execution of other exciting features such as Maps, ads, new WebView plugins, sound null safety support, and more tooling support, to name a few.
The company is also working on making web and desktop support more enhanced especially on the Linux platform, where they just announced a joint venture with the canonical.